κερδαίνω
to gain
also: acquire, to get gain fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G2770 appears in the Book of James — 1 distinct verse. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Greek form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Greek New Testament; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences of this word are not indexed here.
James
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
κερδαινω — transliterated kerdaínō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to gain.” Where the King James Version says “i might gain,” newer translations reach for “win” (Berean Standard Bible); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The Greek New Testament uses it across 15 verses — uncommon. More than a third of its appearances fall in Matthew. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses; alongside “to gain” it spans “acquire” and “to get gain”. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2770 catalogs a Greek word from the Greek New Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Greek New Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 15
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 15 distinct verses.
- 8 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 8 of 27 New Testament books.
- #726
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 726 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 15 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Matthew 5 verses 33%
- 1 Corinthians 4 verses 27%
- Mark 1 verse 7%
By section of the New Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Some books belong to more than one corpus (Luke is in both the Gospels and the Lukan corpus, and so on), so these shares overlap and need not total 100%. Each figure is a share of the word’s 15 distinct verses.
- Gospels 7 verses · 47%
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 33%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 13%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 13%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: I might gain 5×, He shall gain 2×, I have gained 2×
- American Standard Version: I might gain 5×, I have gained 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Win 5×, Gain 2×, Gained 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gain 4×, I might gain 4×, Gained 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2770 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2770 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2770 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2770 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 senses Thayer's distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- to gain, acquire, to get gain
- metaph.
Word origin
Derived from κερδος (kérdos) (G2771) — gain.
From G2771 ; to gain (literally or figuratively): - (get) gain win.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 11 distinct written forms G2770 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| κερδήσω kerdḗsō | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Singular | 1 Corinthians 9:19 | 5 |
| ἐκέρδησα ekérdēsa | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Matthew 25:20 | 2 |
| κερδάνω kerdánō | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Singular | 1 Corinthians 9:21 | 1 |
| κερδήσας kerdḗsas | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Luke 9:25 | 1 |
| κερδήσομεν kerdḗsomen | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | James 4:13 | 1 |
| κερδήσῃ kerdḗsē | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 16:26 | 1 |
| κερδηθήσονται kerdēthḗsontai | Verb, Future, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | 1 Peter 3:1 | 1 |
| κερδῆσαί kerdē̂saí | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | Acts 27:21 | 1 |
| κερδῆσαι kerdē̂sai | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | Mark 8:36 | 1 |
| ἐκέρδησας ekérdēsas | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular | Matthew 18:15 | 1 |
| ἐκέρδησεν ekérdēsen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 25:17 | 1 |
